25131. (Dmitry Dubrovsky) Escape from Freedom. The Russian Academic Community
. . . . . and the Problem of Academic Righst and Freedoms [article]
25132. (David K. Wright) Impact of Farming on African Landscapes [article]
25133. (Joseph Kelly) America’s Longest Siege ― Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow
. . . . . March to Civil War
25134. (Claudia Chang, Sergei S. Ivanov & Perry A. Tourtellotte) Landscape and
. . . . . Settlement over 4 Millennia on the South Side of Lake Issyk Kul, Kyrgysztan:
. . . . . Preliminary Results of Survey Research in 2019–2021 [article]
25135. (Matti Charlton) Dendrome
25136. (Mehdi Hasan) Win Every Argument
25137. (Pavla Peterle Udivič & Miran Erič) Logboat from Ižanska I {SI-81} from
. . . . . Ljubljana: New Evidence for Iron Age Transportation on the Ljubljana
. . . . . Marshes, Slovenia [article]
25138. (James Ker-Lindsay & Mikulas Fabry) Succession and State Creation
25139. (Tristan Carter) Obsidian Consumption in the Late Pleistocene ― Early
. . . . . Holocene Aegean: Contextualising New Data from Meolithic Crete [article]
25140. (Michael R. Waters, Thomas W. Stafford Jr. & David L. Carlson) The Age of
. . . . . Clovis ― 13,050 to 12,750 cal yr B.P. [article]
25141. (Mike Parker Pearson, et al) The Stonehenge Riverside Project: Exploring the
. . . . . Neolithic Landscape of Stonehenge [article]
25142. (Tomas Larsson & Stithorn Thananithichot) Who Votes for Virtue? Religion and
. . . . . Party Choice in Thailand’s 2019 Election [article]
Category Archives: B - READING - Page 3
READING — APRIL 2023
READING — MARCH 2023
25104. (Kirsti Mäkinen) The Kalevala: Tales of Magic and Adventure
. . . . . [ill. Pirkko-Liisa Surojegin] [tr. Kaarina Brooks] [prose re-telling of
. . . . . Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala with verse samples]
. . . . . [see other translations: Bosley at 27 & 8563; Kirby at 391;
. . . . . Friberg at 18426]
25105. (Matti Charlton) The Dark Woods ― A Very Light Bedtime Children’s
. . . . . Story
(William M. Breiding ‑ed.) Portable Storage Nine:
Read more »
25074. (Matti Charlton) You’re Mine ― A True Story for Brave Little Ones
There are not many books for children in which death is the main topic. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ 1938 novel The Yearling, which dealt with death from a child’s point of view, comes to mind, but it was not conceived by it’s author as a “children’s book.” It is today generally shelved with “young adult” fiction in libraries, but that was not a category in use at the time of its writing. The author was addressing adults in a story written from the point of view of a child. Its clarity and emotional intensity allowed it to reach a younger audience. We expect a teenager to have some concern with the idea of death.
But when it comes to books for younger children, death is still a taboo topic. It is something that, many believe, children should not be exposed to in fiction, or even allowed to think about. This presumes that no small child will encounter death, or have to think of it, or need to understand it. Except, of course, the children in Uvalde, Texas, and Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Except, of course, the millions of small children who have had to experience a death in the family, or even the death of a beloved pet. And that doesn’t even take into account parts of the world torn up by war, where small children are drenched in the stench of death. There aren’t many children in Ukraine or Yemen, today, who are oblivious to death. Religion is of little help, here. It is far more concerned with denying death than with understanding it, or preparing for it. At its worst, it attempts to dismiss life as a mere prelude to an imagined eternal existence … at once obliterating death from thought and obliterating life from significance.
So I would recommend Matti Charlton’s You’re Mine. I wish I had such a book available to me when I was very young. In very straightforward language, it explains death, how it is inevitable, and why its existence underlies the preciousness of life: “Be grateful for your life. Every day. Every second. Cherish every moment while your life is still yours.” The narrator is death itself, portrayed as a monstrous beast, speaking to the reader, “Little One.” While the artwork of the book is designed to be just scary enough for a child to handle, it also evokes the beauty of life in a way that a child can understand. It is refreshingly free of evasion, deceit, or existentialist blarney. Many adults would benefit from reading it, since, as the author says in a postscript: “..we are all Little Ones, after all.”
READING — FEBRUARY 2023
25089. [2] (Robert McClodkey) Homer Price
25090. (Rosemary Sutcliffe) Beowulf [story]
25091. (Peter S. Ungar) Evolution’s Bite ― A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins
25092. (Jesús Gil Fuensanta, Alfredo Mederos Martín & Otabek Uktamovich Muminov)
. . . . . Not Far from the Limits of the Northern Uruk Culture in the Middle/Upper
. . . . . Euphrates: the Later Calcolithic Levels of Surtepe [article]
25093. (Susan Dewey, et al) Control Creep and the Multiple Exclusions Faced by Women
. . . . . in Low-Autonomy Sex Industry Sectors [article]
25094. (Raziel Reid) When Everything Feels Like the Movies
25095. (Joseph R. Bishop & Pascal Gagneux) Evolution of Carbohydrate Antigens ―
. . . . . Microbial Forces Shaping Host Glycomes? [article]
Read more »
READING — JANUARY 2023
25071. (John Wilkins) The Discovery of a New World: or, a Discourse tending to Prove,
. . . . . that it is Probable there may be another Habitable World in the Moon [1638]
25072. (Mike Curato) Flamer [graphic novel]
25073. (Richard Thompson, et al) In Search of Pleistocene Remains at the Gates of
. . . . . Europe: Directed Surface Survey of the Megalopolis Basin [article]
25074. (Matti Charlton) You’re Mine ― A True Story for Brave Little Ones [graphic story]
25075. (Eberhard Zangger & Serdal Mutlu) Putting the Luwian Culture on the Map
. . . . . [article]
25076. (Bennett Bacon, et al) An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and
. . . . . Phenological Calendar [article]
25077. (Matti Charlton) The Ballast Boy [novella]
25078. The Voynich Manuscript [facsimile]
Read more »
Tuesday, January 3, 2023 — The Remarkable John Wilkins
I do seriously, and upon good grounds affirm it possible to make a flying-chariot; in which a man may sit, and give such a motion unto it, as shall convey him through the air. And this perhaps might be made large enough to carry divers men at the same time, together with food for their viaticum, and commodities for traffic. It is not the bigness of any thing in this kind, that can hinder its motion, if the motive faculty be answerable thereunto. We see a great ship swims as well as a small cork, and an eagle flies in the air as well as a little gnat.
This engine may be contrived from the same principles by which Archytas made a wooden dové, and Regiomontanus a wooden eagle.
I conceive it were no difficult matter (if a man had leisure) to shew more particularly the means of composing it.
The perfecting of such an invention, would be of such excellent use, that it were enough, not only to make a man famous, but the age also wherein he lives. For besides the strange discoveries that it might occasion in this other world, it would be also of inconceivable advantage for travelling, above any other conveyance that is now in use.
So that notwhithstanding all these seeming impossibilities, it is likely enough, that there may be a means invented of journeying to the moon; and how happy shall they be, that are first successful in this attempt?
― John Wilkins, The Discovery of a New World: or, a Discourse tending to prove, that it is probable there may be another Habitable World in the Moon, with a Discourse of the Possibility of a Passage thither (published in 1638)
Though Wilkins published this half a century before the publication of Newton’s Principia, he had a pretty good grasp of gravitation, though it remained unnamed and its nature baffled him, and could picture well enough the behaviour of bodies in space. He explicitly stated that if there were a tunnel dug through the Earth that intersected its center and ended at its antipodes, an object thrown down it would come to rest, hovering, exactly at the center. Wilkins was a mathematician, and ten years after the Discovery of a New World, published a volume called Mathematical Magick, in which he explained the general principles of mechanics, speculated on possible technological advances in the future (including flight), and urged his readers to pursue scientific studies.
READING — DECEMBER 2022
25053. (Nushin Arbabzadah & Nile Green) Between Afghan “Idolography” and Kafir
. . . . . “Autoethnography”: A Muslim Convert Describes His Former Religion [article]
25054. (George Magnus) Red Flags ― Why Xi’s China Is in Jeopardy
25055. (Claudia Chang) Inner Asian Pastoralism in the Iron Age: The Talgar Case,
. . . . . South-Eastern Kazakhstan [article]
25056. (Dan Davis) The Wolf God
25057. (Oula Seitsonen) Change and Continuity in the Holocene Lithics Use in the
. . . . . Nyanza Province, Kenya: A General Overview [article]
Read more »
READING — NOVEMBER 2022
25034. (Nile Green) The Languages of Indian Ocean Studies: Models, Methods and
. . . . . Sources [article]
25035. (Jeremiah Curtain) Myths and Legends of Ireland
25036. (Sergei B. Klimenko, Maria V. Stanyukovich & Galian B. Sychenko) Poetic
. . . . . Language and Music of the hudhud ni nosi, a Yattuka Funeral Chant,
. . . . . the Philippines [article]
25037. (Christina Papoulia) Seaward Dispersals to the NE Mediterranean Islands
. . . . . in the Pleistocene. The Lithic Evidence in Retrospect [article]
Read more »
READING — OCTOBER 2022
25000. [2] (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) Le petit prince
25001. (Jorrit M. Kelder) An Argument for a Bronze Age Introduction of the Chicken
. . . . . in Greece [article]
25002. (Nigel Goring-Morris & Anna Belfer Cohen) “Far and Wide”: Social Networking
. . . . . in the Early Neolithic of the Levant [article]
25003. (Laurent Binet) Civilizations
25004. (André-Yves Bourgès) À propos d’une clé de l’œuvre de sir Walter Scott. L’origine
. . . . . angevine des Frazer d’Ecosse — naissance d’une tradition [article]
Read more »
READING — SEPTEMBER 2022
24977. (Jim Grimsley) How I Shed My Skin
24978. (Steve Muhlberger) [in blog Muhlberger’s World History] Two Books on Charny
. . . . . [review]
24979. (Steve Muhlberger) [in blog Muhlberger’s World History] My Reaction to
. . . . . The Last Duel [review]
24980. (Jeffrey M. Hurwit) The Athenian Acropolis ― History, Mythology, and Archaeology
. . . . . from the Neolithic Era to the Present
24981. (C. M. Clark, et al) The Malta Cistern Mapping Project: Expedition II [article]
24982. (David K. Wright) Climate Change: Lacustrine Zone [article] Read more »